Birds
& Blooms
Whatever else this year has been, it
has been a good year for bird sightings here in my small patch on the southern
end of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. The
picture above is of my new bird sighting for this year. I looked out the big living room window one May
afternoon, while my workplace was still closed, and spotted a flash of black
and white and red in the biggest lilac.
Woodpecker! I thought to myself, and knelt backwards in my chair to figure out whether it
was a downy or a hairy, both of which have often visited before. But the pattern was irregular, not the black
bars the other two have. And there was
red on top of its head instead of at the nape of the neck. It worked its way around and around the trunk
of the lilac, drilling as it went, leaving rings of regular, tiny holes behind
it. As it changed position I was able to
see a V of black on its upper chest with an upside-down triangle of red within
it. The red on the top of its head
looked like it was standing upright, like a crew-cut, or a high-top shade, a
comparison I found amusing. That doesn’t
come across in this picture, but this was the one that best showed all of its
characteristic markings.
It stayed long enough that I had
time to get out my camera and get several shots of it, as well as a lot of
shots of the trunk where it had been only seconds before the shutter
clicked. Patience and luck are needed to
get even passable bird pictures. (I have
yet to get a recognizable picture of a hummingbird. Even to the naked eye, or in my case the
eye-glassed eye, they are often just a blur of motion.) When it flew away I got out the bird book to
try to identify it. Not a flicker, they
are brown and grey. We had those at the
farm in Sanbornton when I was a teenager, but I’ve never seen one here, less
than ten miles away. Not last year’s new
bird, the red-bellied woodpecker, which I haven’t seen this year. It must have seen the map in my book, which
insists that it doesn’t come to New Hampshire.
And it doesn’t really have a red belly, just a vague reddish tinge so
low on its belly that it’s almost between its legs. It’s very hard to see. The most distinguished marking on a
red-bellied woodpecker is the broad red stripe from between its eyes to the
nape of its neck. I’d have called it a
red-headed woodpecker, except that there is already one of those, which does
have a completely red head. But I’m not
likely to see that one around here since, according to my book, published by
the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, it does not come as far north as New England. Of course, the Red-Bellied Woodpecker isn't supposed to come this far north either.
It was certainly way too small to be
a pileated woodpecker, which I’ve seen and heard for most of the thirty-plus years
we’ve lived here, with its Woody Woodpecker cry and jackhammer drilling in the
pine trees. Looking out the window into
the back yard, I can see the huge holes they have drilled into the pine trees,
with the splashes of white underneath them – sap or guano, or perhaps
both. They and other birds have nested
in those holes, which I’ve always taken great delight in. And several times a day they would fly from
our backyard pine trees (Eastern White Pines) across the street to the pines
behind my late mother-in-law’s house, crying their exulting Woody Woodpecker cry as they went.
All right, I will finally get to the
point. This new bird is a yellow-bellied
sapsucker. If you look very hard you can
see the yellowish tinge on his belly, just above his legs. But, no, it’s not obvious. What you are most likely to notice first is
the red crew-cut, and, in the males, the red throat. Females do not have the red throat, only the
red crew-cut and the black V at the throat, which I verified several days after
seeing the male. Unlike other
woodpeckers, they lap up the sap, and insects trapped therein, from the holes they
drill. Its tongue is specialized for
this with a brush-like tip, according to my book. Also according to my book, it breeds from New
England and Quebec in an upward swath through northern Canada towards Alaska,
and winters in the southeastern U. S., Central American and the Caribbean. I bet they wished they'd stayed there a bit longer when, a few days later, we had May snow…
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| Snow on the Valerie Finnis muscari. |
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